S.F. and L.A. square off for girl's heart

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 22, 2006

In 1969, the vibrant and almost preternaturally self-possessed third-grader
Inez Garcia Ruin
boards a plane from Los Angeles to San Francisco to spend a weekend with her glamorous, womanizing and enterprising father,
Paul Ruin
. Here screams a man who believes in his cool. Paul remains convinced that he has long ago broken from his conservative, white, old-money upbringing, but of course, this isn't entirely the case.

Waiting at the San Francisco airport is Paul's latest girlfriend. She is just another in a long line of usually younger versions of Paul's second and last ex-wife, Inez's mother, Consuelo, a half-Peruvian, half-Mexican ex-flamenco dancer bombshell who resembles Sophia Loren. Outside in his MG, Paul is poised to whisk Inez and the girlfriend off to Telegraph Hill. All the way, Paul jokes about Inez's Nixon-loving, commie-hating, John Bircher teacher, whom he declares to be the mirror of his own mother, Marguerite.

In this first-person coming-of-age novel, "The Ruins of California," Martha Sherrill takes us through a spot-on detailed decade of cultural contrasts in Northern and Southern California. Here are worlds where arty bohemian weekends with Inez's father, as well as English-style horse riding and tea partying with Marguerite, leave life seeming pale and stale back home in L.A. suburbia with struggling mother Connie and Abuelita, who works as a housekeeper.

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But this is not at all the kind of hectic or bitter split a child might suffer while bouncing between lifestyles, such as described in Rebecca Walker's chilling autobiography. Inez's teenage years, especially, are a delight to experience. There is an innocent "Bonjour Tristesse" flavor, without the heavy Electra complex or author Francoise Sagan's young cynicism.

Though Inez's handsome, rakish father looms exceedingly large in her life, the apple of her eye is her half brother, Whitman. Whitman embodies Inez's ideal of regality, breeding and bohemianism, just as her favorite of her father's girlfriends eventually does, the blond Justine. In this passage describing Whitman's mother, Patricia -- a blond barefoot contessa and her father's first wife -- Inez reveals an envy of birth, which she otherwise never confronts or questions:

"She wasn't from California -- that was why, I felt sure. She wasn't descended from frontier robber barons like Justine, who'd been raised with so much room and money that she didn't know how to be around regular people. Patricia wasn't a first-generation assimilation test case like my mother, who, besides being stunningly beautiful, just wanted to fit in. And, unlike Marguerite, a traditionalist who looked at the world and felt it was going down the tubes -- the quality of everything was deteriorating -- Patricia was excited by anything new, anything she didn't know about. Every tomato she tasted was the best, every friend she introduced to me was the most amazing of all. I'd never met anybody so easy and enthusiastic, and more than once I wished she were my mother -- not just Whitman's."

Though Whitman calls Inez "Little Mexican" and her teen-years best friend calls her "beaner" along with assorted other racial insults, the introspective Inez is curiously without indignation and in fact doesn't seem to have any sort of feeling about ethnicity whatsoever. Neither does the author seem to even entertain the idea that Inez is in denial. When a boy tells another at the cotillion to "ask the Mexican jumping bean to dance," Inez recounts the incident without feeling, as if she were in passive agreement.

Still, all with Inez is not hunky-dory. The dolce vita, smoking pot in North Beach with her father, riding on the back of his motorcycle, waking up to his Egon Schiele prints on the walls, and the view of the water and fog from the house he later builds, all begin to feel a bit empty. So Inez follows her beloved Whitman to Hawaii, where he has followed the waves. Here she discovers that drugs have caught up with both her and her brother.

If over the course of a decade Inez seems entirely without true peril, uncertainty or even a nice healthy dose of "tween" or teen awkwardness, the novel is very much alive with sweetness and light.

At times, the story seems lacking in grit and structure, and as it wanders with musings and memories, the narrative loses drive. Ultimately, this is forgivable. Californians in their 40s, in particular, will be knocked out by nostalgia.

The other problem is that Sherrill concentrates on Inez's time with the richer rather than the poorer relations, and Inez's mother and grandmother lack fullness of character. But this is pardonable too because "The Ruins of California" is a fairy tale. Not because Inez's life couldn't possibly happen exactly this way but because we always know that she will be all right.

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